Top 160 Henry Adams Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

— Henry Adams

Featured in: Impact Quotes, Graduation Quotes, Teacher Quotes, Teaching Quotes, School Quotes

2. “Chaos was the law of nature; Order was the dream of man.”

— Henry Adams

3. “Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.”

— Henry Adams

4. “Friends are born, not made.”

— Henry Adams

5. “They know enough who know how to learn.”

— Henry Adams

6. “All experience is an arch, to build upon.”

— Henry Adams

7. “Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.”

— Henry Adams

8. “A friend in power is a friend lost.”

— Henry Adams

9. “Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.”

— Henry Adams

10. “No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous.”

— Henry Adams

11. “One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly possible.”

— Henry Adams

12. “Absolute liberty is absence of restraint; responsibility is restraint; therefore, the ideally free individual is responsible to himself.”

— Henry Adams

13. “One does every day and without a second thought, what at another time would be the event of a year, perhaps of a life.”

— Henry Adams

14. “Morality is a private and costly luxury.”

— Henry Adams

15. “Practical politics consists in ignoring facts.”

— Henry Adams

16. “Intimates are predestined.”

— Henry Adams

17. “During an election campaign the air is full of speeches and vice versa.”

— Henry Adams

18. “I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It’s always the good men who do the most harm in the world.”

— Henry Adams

19. “The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.”

— Henry Adams

20. “Simplicity is the most deceitful mistress that ever betrayed man.”

— Henry Adams

21. “Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.”

— Henry Adams

22. “If I grapple with sin in my own strength, the devil knows he may go to sleep.”

— Henry Adams

23. “Young men have a passion for regarding their elders as senile.”

— Henry Adams

24. “A new friend is always a miracle, but at thirty-three years old, such a bird of paradise rising in the sage-brush was an avatar. One friend in a lifetime is much; two are many; three are hardly.”

— Henry Adams

25. “Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman’s heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.”

— Henry Adams

26. “By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion; and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.”

— Henry Adams

Featured in: Strong Quotes

27. “History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.”

— Henry Adams

28. “Nothing is more tiresome than a superannuated pedagogue.”

— Henry Adams

29. “Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.”

— Henry Adams

30. “What one knows is, in youth, of little moment; they know enough who know how to learn.”

— Henry Adams

31. “Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.”

— Henry Adams

32. “The great word Evolution had not yet, in 1860, made a new religion of history, but the old religion had preached the same doctrinefor a thousand years without finding in the entire history of Rome anything but flat contradiction.”

— Henry Adams

33. “Good men do the most harm.”

— Henry Adams

34. “There is no such thing as an underestimate of average intelligence.”

— Henry Adams

35. “Harvard College was probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.”

— Henry Adams

36. “Analogies are figures intended to serve as fatal weapons if they succeed, and as innocent toys if they fail.”

— Henry Adams

37. “The philosopher says – I am, and the church scouts his philosophy. She answers: – No! you are NOT, you have no existence of your own. You were and are and ever will be only a part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.”

— Henry Adams

38. “Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.”

— Henry Adams

39. “The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.”

— Henry Adams

40. “Power is poison. Its effect on Presidents had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first, and a worse reaction afterwards.”

— Henry Adams

41. “Some day science may have the existence of mankind in power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.”

— Henry Adams

42. “An American Virgin would never dare command; an American Venus would never dare exist.”

— Henry Adams

43. “You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!”

— Henry Adams

44. “For after all man knows mighty little, and may some day learn enough of his own ignorance to fall down again and pray. Not that Icare. Only, if such is God’s will, and Fate and Evolution – let there be God!”

— Henry Adams

45. “The progress of evolution from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence to upset Darwin.”

— Henry Adams

46. “History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.”

— Henry Adams

47. “The American President resembles the commander of a ship at sea. He must have a helm to grasp, a course to steer, a port to seek.”

— Henry Adams

48. “The Indian Summer of life should be a little sunny and a little sad, like the season, and infinite in wealth and depth of tone, but never hustled.”

— Henry Adams

49. “Energy is the inherent effort of every multiplicity to become unity.”

— Henry Adams

50. “The world is coming to an end in 1950.”

— Henry Adams